Droim Beag · Co. Down
A parish church on a bend of the Lagan, three miles south of Belfast.
Drumbeg means little ridge - Droim Beag - and the ridge is the bank of the River Lagan, three miles south of Belfast. The village is, in the strict sense, a parish: a Church of Ireland church on a piece of high ground above the river, a graveyard around it, a clutch of houses on the roads that lead away from it, and the Lagan Towpath running below. Half a thousand people live in the immediate parish. Most of them work in Belfast or Lisburn. You can be in either in fifteen minutes by car, or on a bike along the towpath in about an hour either direction.
The church is the point. Drumbeg Parish Church - Church of Ireland - has stood on this site, in some form, since the medieval period; the present building dates to around 1798. The graveyard is older than the church and worth a slow walk: country stones, generations of the same surnames, ivy doing its work on the older corners. The original parish was large enough to merit a long history, and the parish records reach back to the seventeenth century, but the village itself is not where you come for an afternoon out. You come because you are walking the towpath, or because you have a relative in the ground, or because you live nearby.
Treat Drumbeg as a stop, not a stay. There is no high street, no pub in the village itself, no restaurant that locals would direct you to as Drumbeg's. The food and the pints are at Edenderry a little further upriver toward Drumbo, or at Hillsborough or Lisburn ten minutes off. What there is here is the church, the bend of the river, and the towpath under the trees - and on the right kind of afternoon, with the light coming through, that is genuinely enough.
